Salesforce Tower

Salesforce Tower, formerly known as the Transbay Tower, is a 1,070 ft (326 m) supertall skyscraper under construction in the South of Market district of downtown San Francisco. Located at 415 Mission Street between First and Fremont Streets, next to the San Francisco Transbay Transit Center site. The development was originally contracted on “spec,” meaning the developer/owner did not have a major tenant lease secured beforehand. As is common in highrise naming convention, as the major tenant the building was renamed Salesforce Tower.

The Salesforce Tower is the centerpiece of the San Francisco Transbay Development (that contains a mix of office, transportation, and residential uses). When completed the Tower will be a standout highrise in the San Francisco skyline, and defining building in the South of Market area.

Salesforce.com will lease half of the planned Transbay Tower in a landmark real estate deal that puts San Francisco’s largest tech employer inside what is slated to be the city’s tallest building.

Company and city officials are set to announce in a private meeting Friday that Salesforce will be the anchor tenant in Transbay Tower – now to become Salesforce Tower thanks to a naming rights agreement – when the 61-story skyscraper is completed in 2017.

The cloud-computing company will pay $560 million over 15 1/2 years to lead developer Boston Properties for 30 floors at Mission and Fremont streets.

The deal for 714,000 square feet marks the biggest corporate lease in the city in recent memory, outstripping J.P. Morgan’s 650,000-square-foot site on Mission Street in 2000.

By taking over the 1.4 million-square-foot tower – set to soar more than 200 feet above the 853-foot-tall Transamerica Pyramid – Salesforce is not just staking a claim on the city’s emerging skyline. It’s also expanding in the South of Market neighborhood, where it already rents most of its local office space.

The planned skyscraper is within a block of 50 Fremont, where the company already leases 500,000 square feet, and a not-yet-finished 30-story building at 350 Mission, where Salesforce plans to fill every floor by 2015. Those leases will continue even after Salesforce moves into its tower.

The three buildings – within a stone’s throw of one another and the planned Transbay Transit Center – will form the base of an enormous urban corporate campus at Fremont and Mission streets.